Chapter 10 ‘The Evangelisation of the Nation, the Revitalisation of the Church and the Transformation of Society’: Megachurches and Social Engagement
Andrew Davies
1 Introduction
By common scholarly consent, Pentecostals have never been particularly engaged social or politically (Anderson 2012; Chong 2015: 219; Davies 2018a; Davies 2019).1 It was not that they were uncaring or uninterested. It did not take the early Pentecostals long to confront the social challenges faced by their communities, even if in small ways, through the establishment of care homes, orphanages and feeding programmes (Kay 2009: 302; Wilson 2011:12). Yet they were too focussed on their hope for the ultimate (as far as they were con- cerned, impending) resolution of eternity to be too deeply and systematically concerned with the hardships faced in the here and now, even when these were hardships that were faced by their own community as much as by any other. Furthermore, they appear to have been concerned that engagement with any sort of ‘social gospel’ would distract them from their central call to preach the ‘full gospel’ of individual transformation through faith in the saving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Undoubtedly, the priority of the earliest Pentecostals was “saving souls rather than changing socio-economic and poli tical structures” (Hunt 2011: 157), and they were so committed to individual transformation that systemic change never became a priority for them (Prakash 2010). But, as time passed and the movement grew, Pentecostals found “such strong solidarity among themselves, courageously going against social norms such as racial segregation, that they forged a social and spiritual culture
1 I am indebted to my colleague Grace Milton for her invaluable support with the initial re- search for this chapter.
© Andrew Davies, 2020 | doi 10.1163/9789004412927_012 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Andrew Davies - 9789004412927 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 11:13:56PM via free access
2 https://allsaints-pas.org.
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Pentecostals’ would not have sought to pursue their transformative influence so extensively had they not seen the megachurches supporting this new agenda, sustaining and propagating it more widely through their collabo rations, conferences and events, and consistently forging new pathways for others to follow by drawing upon the imagination and innovation that has long been a distinctive of Pentecostalism (Petersen 2013: 51). As we will see, many of these megachurches are now using that influence to immensely posi- tive effect across the world, drawing upon their own distinctive approaches in contextually-appropriate ways to address the needs that are common to all humanity. Socially-engaged megachurches understand their social concern activity to be a fundamental part of their commitment to be missional expressions of Christian community at the heart of society. Holy Trinity Brompton (htb) offers an excellent practical demonstration of this ideology in practice. Its vi- sion, “to play our part in the evangelisation of the nation, the revitalisation of the church and the transformation of society” sounds at first as if the church sees itself as possessing three, albeit related, responsibilities, but actually the church sees the three clauses not only as indivisible and indistinguish- able, but actually as amounting simply to different ways of phrasing the same core pursuit. As far as htb are concerned, evangelisation, revitalisation and transformation are three ‘modes’ of the same unified mission rather than dis- tinct personae. That mindset undoubtedly, and extensively, shapes the char- acter and form of the church’s social engagement, which for them is not an optional, supplementary concern, but is rather, to continue the trinitarian allusion, its very essence and source of being. For htb, a revitalised church must, as its natural outcome, proclaim the gospel (through evangelism) and live it out (through social transformation) and the resulting spiritual growth must always both promote and result in human flourishing, thereby building stronger communities and making the world a better place for all its citizens. If that is the case, then, what are the megachurches doing to help deliver this world?
2 Megachurches and Social Engagement
2.1 Confronting Poverty in the West If there is any element of commonality to the Western megachurches’ social engagement strategies, it is that the vast majority of them offer a variety of activities seeking to improve the life circumstances of individuals in poverty
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3 Holy Trinity, Brompton (or HTB as it is popularly known, www.htb.org), Jesus House (www .jesushouse.org.uk), New Wine Church Woolwich (www.newwine.co.uk), Kingsway Interna-� tional Christian Centre (www.kicc.org.uk) and (the only non-Pentecostal/Charismatic mega�- church in our study, and indeed in the UK) All Souls, Langham Place (www.allsouls.org). 4 http://audaciouschurch.com. 5 https://www.livetsord.se/uppsala/socialt-humanitart-arbete/. 6 http://godembassy.com/blog/healthy-lifestyle/.
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Harvey crisis (An 2017; Dart 2017), arguably unfairly, but has since been publicly honoured by the city’s mayor for its ‘Hope for Houston’ and ‘Servolution’ pro- grammes, which include relief and rebuilding projects in hurricane-damaged districts as well as its ‘Beacon Center’ daycare facility for the homeless and its food bank.7 The usa’s other largest churches all have their own equivalent pro- grammes. Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Illinois has its ‘Care Center’ which provides free optometric and dental services as well as clothing and grocery banks, and an innovative automotive service, C.A.R.S., which “provides reliable transportation to those in need through refurbished, donated vehicles with the help of volunteer mechanics”.8 Care ministries at Californian multi-site Saddleback Church9 include hospital visitation pro- grammes, support for those with mental health, career and financial and ad- diction difficulties, and even a weight loss and healthy lifestyle programme, the ‘Daniel Plan’.10 Bethel Church, Redding, California11 and Potters House, Dallas, Texas12 also promote a wide portfolio of social care ministries. Such services are not restricted to purely physical locations, either; the translocal reach of the megachurches and their ‘soft power’ influence through traditional and social media mean that even their websites provide important resources for their communities (Martin et al. 2011), with America’s many Black mega- churches being viewed by statutory authorities as critically-important routes for focussed messaging on healthcare to African Americans (Campbell and Wallace 2015). Outside the usa, one of the longest-established and most comprehensive megachurch social concern programmes is that offered out of 38,000 member Sydney-based Hillsong Church. Its CityCare programme13 was established in 1986, only three years after the founding of the church, and offers a wide range variety of community services, including advocacy and personal development programmes; counselling services (with professional as well as volunteer staff) and a health centre; a variety of teams supporting the homeless, visiting nurs- ing homes, prisons and immigration detention centres; a variety of children’s and youth activities including mentoring opportunities and ‘strengthening
7 https://www.lakewoodchurch.com/Pages/Ministry.aspx. 8 https://www.willowcreek.org/en/locations/care-center. 9 https://saddleback.com. 10 https://saddleback.com/connect/ministry/the-daniel-plan. 11 http://bethelredding.com. 12 https://thepottershouse.org. 13 http://hillsong.com/citycare.
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14 http://hillsong.com/citycare/justice-projects/. 15 cf. http://hillsong.com/citycare/kilo-of-kindness/ and http://hillsong.com/citycare/ stuffthebus/. 16 http://www.a21.org. 17 http://visionrescue.co.in, cf. http://hillsong.com/bwc/vision-rescue/. 18 http://www.compassion.com.au. 19 http://hillsong.com/bwc/watoto/. 20 http://hillsong.com/bwc/refugee-response/.
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2.2 Confronting Poverty in the Global South The pattern of activity around poverty relief in megachurches across the majority world is not hugely different either, except perhaps with addition- al emphasis on healthcare and special provision for children and for elders. Asia presents some excellent examples here. The 75,000 member Onnuri (All Nations) Community Church in Seoul, South Korea (en.onnuri.org/about- onnuri/onnuris-vision/) has a special ministry programme for the poor neigh bourhoods of the city and the outlying fishing and farming villages, to tackle social exclusion and poverty there, and also hosts a variety of weekly special worship gatherings for those with learning difficulties,22 a ministry which is also a special concern of City Harvest Church, Singapore (Chan 2017: 298). The world’s largest congregation, 480,000-member Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul23 needs a separate ten-storey building to house its welfare division, which incorporates a health clinic, a medical mission unit and a hospice, a development department with its own specialist security team and a procure- ment division. Yoido also hosts an extensive ministry to North Korean refu- gees and “provides vocational and spiritual training for unemployed youth … apartments for homeless senior citizens and cares for neighbourhoods in poor environments” through its Elim Welfare Town (cf. Anderson 2012: 163– 165). In Indonesia, Bethany Church, Surabaya (with some 70,000 members)24 offers a variety of clinic and health programmes through its Bethany Care agency. At the opposite end of the megachurch scale, the 2,500 member New Hope Power Assemblies of God Church in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India, has recently introduced a free ambulance service to provide first response at ac- cident sites.25 The South American context is slightly different, however. In Santiago, Chile’s largest church, Catedral Evangelica de Jotabeche Chile delivers much of
21 https://cityimpactchurch.com/about-city-impact-church/outreach-and-missions/. 22 http://en.onnuri.org/ministries/handicapped/. 23 http://www.fgtv.com. 24 http://bethanygraha.org/id/. 25 https://johnarulministries.com/ministries.php.
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26 https://www.jotabeche.org/dorcas/. 27 ‘Vivimos una noche de Salvación donde miles aceptaron a Jesús en su corazón’, http:// www.claudiofreidzon.com.
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2.3 Beyond Poverty: Other Social Engagement Strategies The above whistle-stop global tour highlights the huge variety of programmes by which the megachurches seek to relieve poverty in their own communities and sometimes beyond, therefore, but for all the importance of this agenda,
28 http://www.rhema.co.za/hand-of-compassion. 29 https://www.watotochurch.com/index.php?id=11. 30 https://www.watoto.com/our-work/watoto-villages/. 31 https://www.watoto.com/our-work/neighbourhood. 32 http://www.centralaidgh.org.
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33 http://liceofrater.edu.gt. 34 http://www.calvarytemple.in/calvary-bible-college/. 35 https://www.stmellitus.ac.uk/about-us/our-history. 36 https://www.kicc.org.uk/church/community-initiatives/. 37 https://www.forrefugees.uk/about-us/our-partners/. 38 http://www.jesushouse.org.uk/. 39 https://winners-chapel.org.uk/.
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40 https://www.uckg.org/in-need-of-a-prayer/.
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Christian values (Chan 2017: 295). Similarly, Hillsong London also features a ‘community youth’ arm it labels ‘iCareRevolution’,41 which it describes as help- ing to “release the unique potential inside every young person by offering prac- tical help with the issues that every young person faces every day of their life … changing the mind-sets of London’s youth by encouraging them to be the dif- ference … telling the kids that they are not worthless and that they have a fu- ture no matter where they come from or what their background is”.42 Care for the elderly is not neglected either, with an extensive range of projects includ- ing monthly lunch clubs, summer and Christmas parties and ‘adopt a granny/ grandad’ programmes highlighted under the ‘Regenerate rise’ banner.43 For the Hillsong ‘mother church’ in Sydney, engagement with issues around men- tal health and wellbeing and active participation in naidoc week, which celebrates the role of Aboriginal and Islander peoples in modern Australia, have been among more recent interventions. The value of these kind of contributions to the life of megachurch members and non-members is inestimable. The most obvious contribution, perhaps, is relational, in terms of the supportive networks of friendship they provide, helping people to connect with others in cities that are often isolating, and shaping the way people choose careers, develop friendships, relate to their neighbours, conduct their relationships and family lives, look after their health, use their money, or get involved in politics, charity work or campaigning, locally, nationally and globally. Naturally the megachurches wish, and seek, to see their members use those resources for the good of the church as well as the community. But in return they also make a significant investment into their members’ own individual social capital. In any truly global megacity such as London, the role of the church in sup- porting the integration of immigrant communities cannot be overvalued. One of the reasons for the success of London’s African-led megachurches appears to be the support they provide for newcomers to the UK in offering them a re- minder of home and the promise of a new community. But the phenomenon is rather wider than that. Because of London’s black megachurches, the doctor just moved over from Nigeria to work in one of the capital’s big teaching hos pitals gets an instant family who understand the challenges she will be facing in coming to terms with British society, culture and environment, and quite
41 http://icarerevolution.co.uk. 42 http://hillsong.com/uk/bwc/icarerevolution. 43 http://hillsong.com/uk/bwc/the-platt-centre/.
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2.4 Megachurches’ Political Engagement and Cultural Influence Given such a diverse and wide-ranging portfolio of activities worldwide, it is clear that the megachurches do a huge amount to positively impact society. But it is also noteworthy that just about all the interventions above seek to ad- dress individual outcomes, ameliorate individual circumstances, rather than deliver systemic changes. The megachurches are by and large treating the symptoms of social deficit and not its causes. For example, perhaps we some- times failed to ask the right questions, but in our study of London’s black megachurches, the issue of racial justice was never once raised with us. There was plenty of talk about advancement, opportunity and achievement, but this was always in the context of each individual taking personal responsibility for living God-honouring lives. Racism, social deprivation and oppressive societal structures were never raised with us as challenges. There is more than anec- dotal evidence to suggest that this is a more global phenomenon, too; one re- cent study of the priorities of mission programmes across over 450 US mega- churches showed that racial reconciliation, aids, and social justice fell a long way down the list of priorities (with interreligious relations and environmental concerns propping up the table) (Priest et al. 2010). And there are quite prob- ably ideological motivations behind this. As Anderson notes, “Pentecostals have traditionally been opposed to political involvement … [and] have been
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There are two continents, however, where megachurches have adopted a much more positive perspective on politics. In both Africa and South America, megachurches and megachurch leaders have been very actively engaged in electoral politics. Hunt observes “Pentecostalism’s proliferating involvement in a range of political processes and penetrating social activity has been evi- denced in various parts of the world”, adding that particularly in Latin Ameri- ca, “Pentecostals now stride the political landscape, increasingly abandoning their quietism to partake of orchestrated activity as they mobilize themselves for extending electoral opportunities” (Hunt 2011: 157). Such engagement has led to the creation of political parties in Colombia, Venezuela and Nicaragua in particular (Kim and Kim 2008: 169), and varying degrees of electoral success in Argentina and Brazil (Wilson 2011: 26), but it is at least arguably the case that ultimately such engagement has proven problematic for the megachurches. Algranti (2012) argues that for all their influence on their members, the Argen- tinian megachurches have singularly failed to shape national political life, and, indeed, that their leadership has become better trained, better qualified and better able to present themselves on the public stage and develop their own platform, they have distanced themselves from the community that they lead, resulting in a fair measure of conflict between church leaders and Evangelical politicians who both claim to speak for the community that neither groups now adequately reflect. This has led to a desire for churches to build influence in all spheres of society and encourage their members to engage with public life in all its fullness and aspire to leadership opportunities in other fields. Churches such as Mision Carismatica Internacional in Bogota, Colombia high- lights the social significance of the church in its publicity, urge their members to take responsibility for growing into leadership roles across the arts, media and in business as well as in government.44 The challenge in Africa, as outlined comprehensively in the Nigerian and Zambian contexts by Burgess (2015), has resulted in similarly complex and contentious outcomes. Whilst megachurch and denominational leaders may feel they have preserved their religious freedom and pursued public benefit by seeking elected office, it is difficult to argue that their contribution has been unambiguously positive. Little wonder that, as Adekoya notes, “there are those who would want the Church to keep out of politics” in Nigeria (2018: 50).
44 http://mci12.com/blog/2018/07/03/verdaderos-reformadores/.
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3 Megachurches and Social Engagement: How and Why?
All this said, in many ways, it is not so much what the megachurches actually do that is of interest by way of comparison with smaller churches, but how and why they do it. Even a tiny village church can invest in international develop- ment ministry, given our globalised, connected world, and provide social sup- port for the needy of its community (and many of them arguably engage a rather higher proportion of their attenders in such ministries, too). What sets the megachurches apart is the diversity and the scale of their offering and the sheer numbers they can engage with. Managing such a large and diverse port- folio of activities poses immense logistical challenges, but by definition the megachurches have the resources available to accommodate these. However, sometimes they do encounter challenges in aligning ministry and professional commitments. Some activities may invite legal complications, potentially sig- nificant financial risk to the church or reputational challenges. And in areas where external (secular) charitable or government money is available to sup- port activity, there are always concerns from the donor side about appropriate alignment of religious and social objectives and the fear programmes might be used for proselytisation, and nervousness from the megachurch side that ex- ternal funding might restrict their freedom to be explicitly Christian in their activity even though they seek to be wholly inclusives and shun any sort of religious test before or after providing assistance. Not least for such reasons, many of the megachurches set up separate agencies to deliver the work for them. So !Audacious Church, Manchester, routes most of its programmes through its !Audacious Foundation. New Hope Power Church, Madurai, fo- cusses its social care work through an ngo founded by the senior pastor, Love and Care International, which cares for around 1,000 orphans and also runs infrastructure and development projects in some of the slum areas.45 Yoido Full Gospel church separates out its relief and development work out into two separate ngos, the Elim Welfare Town and ‘Good People World Family’,46 which works on healthcare, education, development, emergency relief and child protection internationally and on child support and medical care and relief for North Korean refugees more locally in Korea. Singapore’s City Harvest Church too “maintains a distance between its welfare ministries and politics
45 https://johnarulministries.com/ministries.php. 46 http://eng.goodpeople.or.kr.
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47 https://www.willowcreek.org/en/serve. 48 https://hillsong.com/hills/volunteer/.
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As 60,000 member SaRang Church in Seoul puts it, the central call of any discipleship-focussed church is to ‘awaken the laity’ (Niemandt and Lee 2015: 4), and mobilising the people to meet the need has long been a strength of Pentecostalism (Ma 2009; Petersen 2013: 51). Volunteerism meets needs on many levels. Barnes (2011: 191–192) highlights the important contribution that qualified professional members can make as volunteers to support project de- livery, citing one pastor who told her, “We have a lot of folks in the church who are professionals and they are very generous with their expertise. We help peo- ple directly with access to funds and then indirectly with information that will help them to live their life or break out of poverty … as folks tithe to us 10% of their income, we tithe it right back out”. That empowering capacity is, furthermore, not restricted to activities deliv- ered entirely by the church. Many individual members of megachurches are highly active in society in their own right and are actively involved in social engagement work of some kind outside of the church context, either as a vol- unteer, employee or trustee. Quite a few members have significant roles in lo- cal, regional and even national activities in this space. In our research in Lon- don, for example, we encountered senior civil servants, leaders of ngos large and small, major charitable donors and major charity managers, medics, teachers, social workers, academics, counsellors and councillors of all hues, national politicians and a huge variety of other change agents sat in the pews. Many of them told us that their church’s contribution to their lives was im- mense and a critical element of their support mechanism; and, indeed, that it was their religious commitment that motivated and sustained their professional responsibilities and their personal obligations. I would suggest that the contri- bution made by individual members of the megachurches probably outweighs the contribution made by the churches themselves, and a number of the church leaders we interviewed agreed. Furthermore, many of those individual members were themselves respon- sible for initiating major projects in the churches. One of the key discoveries of our empirical work, for example, was that many of the projects we uncovered were not initiated by church leaders directly, but by members of the congrega- tion who had been inspired by the preaching and culture of the church to be entrepreneurial and challenged by a particular social need to initiate activi- ties themselves. Perhaps, therefore, one key insight is that megachurches suc- ceed by creating the right environment for such activities to flourish and en- couraging their members to ‘step up to the mark’ and lead in life as well as in the church. Members who have imbibed such attitudes cannot do anything
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other than respond to crisis needs because they have been trained to take responsibility for their own lives and commit to addressing the needs of oth- ers. Such activities are therefore as much church-initiated as anything the se- nior leaders themselves do, and are just as thoroughly integrated into the life of the churches and draw extensively on their values. Indeed, as Wilson observes, Pentecostalism’s “principal focus” is “the development of human capital … giv- ing their converts a vision of what they and their societies could become”, and seeking “to assist their own people in rising to the height of their spiritual, personal, and social potential”. And as he continues, though this approach in the more explicitly religious context amounts to what we usually think of as evangelism, it “was not limited to the proclamation of the gospel. It was, in ef- fect, a concerted effort to undertake social redemption from below” (Wilson 2011: 12). Human capital, then, is both the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of megachurch social engagement; but there is value in unpacking the ‘why’ a little more ex- tensively. Evidence suggests a variety of motivations feed into the social con- cern agenda – two of which are very much pragmatic and others which are rather more theological. Practically, firstly, some of the megachurches’ interventions are very clearly motivated by recognition of the social need of the church community itself because of its immediate need. Such commitments can arise from a sense of community or shared experience; Anderson notes that Yoido Church’s com- mitment to confront poverty arises at least partially from the personal experi- ence of its founder, David Yonggi Cho and that of the older generation of lead- ers in South Korea who still all too well remember the deprivation and economic collapse which surrounded the Korean War (Anderson 2012), whilst some of the younger leaders might relate to the challenges faced by rural to urban migrants (Chong and Goh 2014: 409). As the Korean churches preach God’s blessing, their practical ministry also emphasises the role of God’s peo- ple in bringing that blessing in concrete terms into the lives of their brothers and sisters in the church (and that is arguably very much a New Testament model). Second, there is the need of the surrounding community, which in it- self is a call to action. It is sometimes said that Pentecostalism is a religion of the poor, not just for the poor (Ma 2009: 42). However it is also the religion of those who don’t want to stay poor (Benson 2011; cf. Eagle 2015). At least to some extent, megachurches succeed because they present “the images (of the afflu- ent lifestyle, contemporary relevance, and the created community) that prove the message of prosperity with the rest of the nation” (Carney 2012: 76); in Asia in particular, they represent the religion of the emerging middle class rather
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We are characterized by love for God and for our neighbor. In the Frather regardless of our race or economic condition, we are all one in God. We are united by our faith and that is enough and it is enough. Inspired by the love of God, we reflect His love for others, by sharing our faith and helping each other to live it.49
They act, therefore, because to their mind there is an inherent and incontest- able “link between Christian love, social action and eschatological hope” (Bur- gess 2009: 259). They also act because God has blessed them, and with that blessing comes the attendant responsibility of being a blessing to the world around, not least “by providing financial assistance to less-privileged believ- ers and alleviating poverty in the wider society” (Burgess 2009: 258). They act because “the church is a sign of the kingdom of God and of the proleptic
49 http://frater.org/es/acerca-de/que-nos-caracteriza/.
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manifestation of God’s reign, both in what it is and what it does”, and where God reigns, his purpose is accomplished (Niemandt and Lee 2015: 3). They act because social engagement is for them fundamentally part of the task of mission and evangelism. In some ways, evangelism and social action are very clearly distinguished in the megachurches’ thinking and strategy. They provide services to the community without as well as the community within, with no religious restrictions or obligations, free at the point of access and need. But they reject any assumption that there might be a difference be- tween the preaching of the Gospel and its practice. For the megachurches, “So- cial action is mission” (Burgess 2009: 260). And as Elisha noted in his study of Knoxville’s megachurches:
The tendency among many conservative Protestants to insist on a firm distinction between humanitarian effort and religious proselytization (privileging the latter) was rejected by those who favored a more integra- tive, holistic approach, the kind that prioritizes ‘words and deeds’ and regards both as equally crucial for effective evangelism among society’s poor, distressed, and marginalized populations. Making the case for ho- listic evangelism in the evangelical churches of Knoxville – whether this meant arguing for broader conceptions of the church’s role in society or simply arguing that, as one pastor put it, ‘You can’t talk to an empty stomach’ – was a vital strategy by which the socially engaged evangelicals I observed appealed to their conservative base. elisha 2011: 8–9
Here, then, in a sense, we find ourselves full circle, back where we started with the early Pentecostal rejection of an additional ‘social gospel’ being tagged on the end of the real thing, the ‘full gospel’, except this time, it is the ‘real thing’ that is in danger. For Elisha’s ‘socially engaged Evangelicals’, any ‘full gospel’ expression of Christian mission which fails to make a practical difference on the ground for the poorest of the world fails to stand as a viable expression of God’s grace in Christ. A gospel that isn’t social is no gospel at all for the mega- churches, who pursue social transformation on the basis of their theological obligations, and identify themselves as continuing a long tradition of Christian commitment to social change which can be traced back to heroic figures of earlier centuries such as Elisabeth Fry, William Wilberforce, Thomas and Syrie Barnardo, Robert Raikes, Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Lord Shaftes- bury and William and Catherine Booth. They act because they have a story to continue and a world to keep transforming. They act because the need is still
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References
Adekoya, R. 2018. “The Church as a Stakeholder in the Socio-political Development of Society: The Example of Nigeria.” Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association. 38:1, 50–63. Alexander, P. 2009. Signs and Wonders: Why Pentecostalism is the World’s Fastest Grow- ing Faith. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Algranti, J. 2012. “Megachurches and the Problem of Leadership: An Analysis of the Encounter between the Evangelical World and Politics in Argentina.” Religion, State and Society. 40:1, 49–68. An, K. 2017. “Even if Joel Osteen did the right thing, he lost a chance to teach Christian- ity.” USA Today, 2 September. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/09/02/ joel-osteen-right-close-lakewood-church-but-he-lost-chance-teach-christianity- kirkland-an-column/622215001/. Anderson, A. 2012. “A ‘Time to Share Love’: Global Pentecostalism and the Social Min- istry of David Yonggi Cho.” Journal of Pentecostal Theology. 21:1,152–167. Barnes, S.L. 2011. “Black Megachurches: Social Gospel Usage and Community Empow- erment.” Journal of African American Studies. 15:2, 177–198. Benson, D.A. 2011. “Black Religiosity: An Analysis of the Emergence and Growth of Black Megachurches.” Unpublished MLS dissertation, University of Toledo. Burgess, R. 2009. “African Pentecostal Spirituality and Civic Engagement: The Case of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Britain.” Journal of Beliefs & Values. 30:3, 255–273. Burgess, R. 2015 “Pentecostals and Politics in Nigeria and Zambia: An Historical Per- spective.” In M. Lindhart, ed, Pentecostalism in Africa: Presence and Impact of Pneu- matic Christianity in Postcolonial Societies. Leiden, Brill, 291–321. Campbell, A.D., and Wallace, G. 2015. “Black megachurch websites: An Assessment of Health Content for Congregations and Communities.” Health Communication. 30:6, 557–565. Campbell, D.E., and Putnam, R.D. 2012. “God and Caesar in America: Why Mixing Reli- gion and Politics is Bad for Both.” Foreign Affairs. 91:2, 34–43. Carney, C.R. 2012. “Lakewood Church and the Roots of the Megachurch Movement in the South.” Southern Quarterly. 50:1, 61–78.
50 http://hillsong.com/bwc.
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